MLA Strategic Plan: Engaging Members in our Preferred Future
A strategic planning process resembles planning a family vacation. At the outset, everyone brings to the conversation their individual preferences about priorities, experiences, pace and ultimate destinations. All options are tempered by the realities and constraints of time and budget. Conversations and planning lead to common directions and ultimately, choices are made and priorities, budgets, timelines and destinations are determined.
At MLA the process is similar. We are on a journey. We have listened to member priorities, factored in time and budget and made choices that reflect what our members value. As a result, we now have a new mission and clearly identified core values to guide us as we evaluate future opportunities.
The MLA strategic plan articulates a preferred future based on member input and survey results. Members clearly want MLA to focus on advocacy for libraries and library professionals. They want MLA to be a primary source of high quality professional development, advancement and leadership training for professionals. They value MLA as a forum for collaboration, cooperation and partnerships to cultivate cutting-edge ideas and awareness of best practices. Members expressed a long- term desire for vital products and services essential to library and library professionals' success and for essential information and data to do their jobs. This preferred future will not happen overnight. In fact, it will require significant member involvement, conversations, resources refinement and more choices.
How we get there is up to us. But one thing is clear; to achieve this preferred future, MLA must create greater value for its members, engage its members in change and be sustainable. Therefore, for the next three years, MLA will focus on four goals: engaging members, creating greater value for members, ensuring that MLA is sustainable and that we deliver high quality information to our members.
Our annual plan maps out strategies and details of programs and initiatives that MLA members are engaged in today to achieve these goals and new directions. Highlights of the strategic plan and annual plan priorities are available for your review.
But all planning must eventually lead to tangible results. For example, as we head into this Fall, I am proud to report successes in our members' two top priorities. In advocacy, in the worst budget year in recent history, MLA has fought against all odds and successfully increased state aid to libraries from $5.8 million to $ 6 million in the House and we continue to fight for $ 7 million to save state aid and MeL and MeLCat. In professional development, our Annual Conference in Traverse City, November 9-12 is complete with nearly 70 high quality educational programs.
We will now turn our conversation to what is required to make MLA sustainable in order to achieve these larger dreams as a library community. It's time to clarify a confusing value proposition where membership benefits are not clear, clarify membership classifications in our bylaws to more clearly align benefits with value and tackle a complicated dues structure that no longer works.
My theme for this year is Yes We Can! Libraries and MLA have survived tougher times than these. Like a family planning a vacation, I invite you all to join me in rebuilding a new MLA to meet the library community's needs for the next generation.
Christine Berro,
President
